Interview: Alberta Whittle

By Susan Mansfield, 10.04.2023

Alberta Whittle by Matthew A Williamson

Offered a solo exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, most artists would simply focus on their show. Alberta Whittle, however, started looking at the history of the building, at its previous life as a charitable school during the late 18th and 19th centuries, and at the 11 children buried in a small graveyard on the site.

“Obviously child mortality would have been very high, but also it struck me that this place is a receptacle of quite a lot of memory,” she says, thoughtfully. “I thought that the work should really speak of that.”

Whittle is deeply attuned to the presence of the past. Often, this is in relation to black and colonial histories, but her sense of compassion also extends more widely. The children are commemorated in a pair of paintings in the show: one lists their names, the other says simply: “Remember unlived universes”.

In just five years, she has come to occupy an important place in the contemporary art firmament. When she won the Margaret Tait Award in 2018, she was a respected but not widely known Scots-Barbadian graduate of Glasgow School of Art’s MFA course. She had her first solo show in a UK public gallery at Dundee Contemporary Arts the following year. Then accolade followed accolade: the Frieze Award, a Turner Prize Bursary, selection for British Art Show 9 and the invitation to represent Scotland at last year’s Venice Biennale.

This exhibition, Create Dangerously, curated by NGS’s Lucy Askew, is the homecoming for her Venice work, but it was always planned as something much bigger. Occupying the entire ground floor of Modern One, it brings together all the aspects of her multidisciplinary practice for the first time. It says something about how prolific she is that she could fill this space without difficulty with work from the last five years, and still has much more in reserve.

“I was beyond excited at the thought of having so much scope to work with,” she says. “Seeing how all the works speak to each other has been really special. In a strange way, I feel I know my work a little better because it’s all out, it’s not just sitting somewhere shoved up against a wall in my studio.”

Whittle is best known for her films, which combine hard-hitting issues - slavery, police brutality, the Windrush scandal, the disproportionate number of black deaths from covid-19 - with more meditative sections often featuring dance, music or ritual enacted by Whittle herself and her various collaborators. 

‘Lagareh - The Last Born’, a 45-minute film which was the centrepiece of her Venice show and is the centre of this one too - circles around the story of Sheku Bayoh, a 30-year-old father-of-two who died after being restrained by police in Kirkcaldy in 2015. It ends with a (disturbingly long) litany of names of people of colour who have allegedly died at the hands of the police in the UK.

However, this is one of just two films in the show - the other is ‘Holding the Line: A Refrain in Two Parts’, which includes footage of a black man being searched by police after being stopped in the street during lockdown. The other rooms, repainted in rich, deep colours, house drawings, paintings, digital collages and sculpture, from a life-size replica of a Barbadian chattel house to 22 bronze casts of the artist’s tongue.

We talk in a room filled with paintings, many of which have sculptural elements added to them - fronds of rafia or Barbadian fretwork. Whittle, in a striking red silk dress for press photographs, is warm, generous with her time and as articulate as ever. She says some of these works were inspired by her dreams, others by old photographs from the family album. 

“My grandad was a really keen photographer and so he would often take photographs of the family, especially at weekends when they would go on a Sunday drive and everyone would dress up. There’s something really special for me about seeing these moments of my family presenting their best selves.” She pauses. “Also I think there’s something deeply political about seeing black people in moments of joy. For me that’s a deeply radical act.”

“I think I have been a bit shy about showing the paintings because they are something I often make very privately in between making other things. But sometimes you need to take risks. Being an artist, for me, is about taking risks and getting out of my comfort zone.”

The thing people don’t realise, she says, is that these “softer” works are created at the same time as the films. “So when I was editing Holding the Line or Lagareh, I was painting or making in between. I think I need the release of doing something pleasurable when I’m doing something that’s tough, that’s rage-filled. I can become too filled with difficult emotions, I need that balance.” After she finished the work for Venice, she said, she did a lot of painting and making.

For Whittle, it all goes back to making. As a teenager, often unwell and in pain from fibromyalgia (she moved from Barbados to the UK when she was 12, partly to access better medical treatment), painting, drawing and making collages was an escape. “I think art did save my life,” she says. “It kept me going. That’s why, for me, it is always hopeful. I know other artists feel very differently and I totally respect that, but for me art is about hope.”

It’s also a space of resistance. The title Create Dangerously is taken from Haitian- American writer Edwidge Danticat, and posits creativity and solidarity as acts of resistance to injustice, anti-blackness, brutality. “I do think this exhibition is meant to be an invitation to think differently about how we’re moving in the world, and to acknowledge that this world is incredibly dangerous for people. It is becoming, in some ways, a more brutal place. It’s dangerous for migrants, for women, for queer people, for black people, it’s deeply unsafe. So how can we learn new ways of strategising together?”

Unusually, among artists, Whittle is always concerned about creating a caring environment for her audience. Here, as in previous shows, she encourages us to take time out to rest, even providing hand-made quilts to wrap up in while watching her films. Her natural compassion extends from her circle of collaborators to the audience, to those lost children buried in the gallery ground and, perhaps most importantly, to herself.

That’s the other reason for the paintings, the textiles (her first degree was in Tapestry at Edinburgh College of Art), the making. “I also want to find pleasure, I want to find hope and rest. That, for me, is just as political as thinking about interactions with the police: to survive and find rest and relaxation and joy. Sheku Bayoh died so young. Nurturing oneself is a political act.” Perhaps, in a way, the most political of all. 

Alberta Whittle: Create Dangerously is at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) until 7 January 2024